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72-522: Buratino (Russian: Буратино) is the main character of Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy 's 1936 fairy tale The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Buratino , which is based on the 1883 Italian novel The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi . Buratino originated as a character in the commedia dell'arte . The name Buratino derives from the Italian burattino , which means "wooden puppet" or "doll". The book

144-494: A "hard life" in the Soviet Union, Tolstoy was a highly privileged Soviet citizen, who prospered under the dictator, Joseph Stalin , when other writers who had chosen to live under Soviet rule throughout the civil war were persecuted. According to a widespread rumour, he was a millionaire with a 'bottomless bank account'. The American journalist Eugene Lyons noted how "almost alone among Russians, Tolstoy lived in baronial style in

216-443: A collective letter, with other writers, declaring "We demand merciless punishment for traitors, spies and murderers who sell their homeland." In 1937, he published his novel Bread , which eulogised Stalin's role in the defence of Tsaritsyn (later renamed Stalingrad) during the civil war. This prompted one Soviet reader to write to him anonymously, saying that he had previously admired Tolstoy as Russia's greatest living writer since

288-566: A divorce, when she became pregnant, she returned to Paris in May 1911, where he joined her, so that he could be registered under French law as the father of their daughter, Marianna. They returned to St Petersburg later in the year, but moved to Moscow in 1912. In the summer of 1914 Tolstoy and Dymshitz took a vacation in Koktebel , Crimea, where he met a 17 year old ballerina named Margarita Kandaurova. Nikolai Tolstoy wrote in 1983 that "The break with Sophia

360-584: A divorce, which was finalised in 1910, but Rosenfeld always refused to divorce Dymshitz. In 1907 Tolstoy broke off his studies to dedicate himself to writing. The couple decided to emigrate in 1907, and arrived in Paris in January 1908, to join a wide network of emigre Russian writers and artists, including Nikolay Gumilyov , Valery Bryusov , Konstantin Balmont , Andrei Bely , Maximilian Voloshin . He and Gumilyov launched

432-511: A fellow writer who had slapped his wife, and objected to a verdict which implied fault on both sides. Tolstoy was Chairman of the USSR Writers Union in 1936-38. In January 1937, during the second of the Moscow show trials , at which 17 defendants including former leading Bolsheviks such as Georgy Pyatakov and Karl Radek were forced to confess to crimes they had not committed, Tolstoy signed

504-436: A former White Army soldier and committed anti-Communist, who became a leading authority on 20th century Russian literature reckoned that: Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy is, without doubt, one of the most gifted Russian writers of the 20th century … But—and this is the point—this man, endowed with so many extraordinary gifts and sharing the heritage of the great age of Russian literature, lacks one quality which distinguished all of

576-498: A memorable account of his early years (the book is sometimes mistakenly believed to be about his son, Nikita; in truth, however, he only used the name because it was his favorite – and he would later give it to his eldest son). In 1936, he created an adaptation of the famous Italian fairy tale about Pinocchio entitled the Adventures of Buratino or The Golden Key , whose main character, Buratino, quickly became hugely popular among

648-508: A periodical that folded after one issue for lack of funds. Tolstoy's first book of poems, Lyric , was published in 1907, at his own expense, but in later life he was embarrassed by it and preferred to forget it. His second poetry collection, Beyond the Blue Rivers (1908) was his last. In a letter to his adoptive father, he complained that the name 'Tolstoy' meant that people had high expectations of him, though Voloshin suggested to him that it

720-454: A rambling many-roomed mansion stocked with rich antiques ... the whole atmosphere of ripe old-world culture seemed like a throw-back to a nearly forgotten period." Anna Akhmatova paid a back-handed tribute to his ability to live well in a short poem written in the 1920s, which included the lines: Ah, where are those islands ... Where the villain Yagoda Would not drive people to

792-540: A relative of the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev . She married Count Nikolay Alexandrovich Tolstoy (1849–1900), a member of the aristocratic Tolstoy family and a distant relative of Leo Tolstoy . Aleksey claimed that Count Tolstoy was his biological father, which allowed him to style himself as a Count; since his mother had taken a lover and left her husband before he was born, not all of his contemporaries believed him. The Nobel Prize winning author Ivan Bunin , who knew him as

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864-610: A variety of products and stores marketed to children in Russia and the post-Soviet states — most notable of these are the Buratino  [ ru ] brand soft drink, which has a caramel taste, and "Golden Key" ( Zolotoy klyuchik ) toffee . Buratino is also the nickname of the TOS-1 multiple launch rocket system, due to the big "nose" of the launcher. A location in the story, Поле чудес (в Стране Дураков), literally 'The Field of Wonders (in

936-532: A war correspondent, visiting England and France, and wrote several essays and two plays. Tolstoy opposed the Bolshevik Revolution . To escape living under Bolshevik rule, he moved with his family in 1918 to Odesa . Then, as the White Army was driven out of Crimea, they fled to Constantinople, before once more relocating to Paris. Unhappy at being, as he put it, "cut off from his homeland", in 1920, he wrote

1008-456: A young man, wrote in his diary, on 23 February 1953: " Aldanov said that Alyosha Tolstoy himself told him that he, T., bore the surname Bostrom until the age of 16 and then went to see his imaginary father, Count Nick Tolstoy, and begged to legitimize him." According to author and historian Nikolai Tolstoy , a distant relative: His father had been a rake-hell cavalry officer, whose rowdy excesses proved too much even for his fellow hussars . He

1080-419: Is a long-nosed wooden puppet. According to the story, he is carved by Papa Carlo (the story's version of Geppetto ) from a log, and suddenly comes to life. Upon creation, Buratino comes out long-nosed due to Papa Carlo's sloppy woodworking. Papa Carlo tries to shorten it, but Buratino resists. Papa Carlo then sells his only good jacket in order to buy textbooks for Buratino and sends him to school. However,

1152-534: Is credited with having produced some of the earliest works of science fiction in the Russian language . His novels Aelita (1923) about a journey to Mars and The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin (1927) have gained immense public popularity. The former spawned a pioneering sci-fi movie in 1924. His supernatural short story, Count Cagliostro , reportedly inspired the 1984 film Formula of Love . He penned several books for children, starting with Nikita's Childhood ,

1224-659: Is the dominant emotion that grips citizens of the USSR. Don't you see it? ... Do you live in an ivory tower? In December 1937 Tolstoy was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union . He became a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1939. Tolstoy spent 16 years studying the life of Peter the Great . His first work on this subject was his 1929 play, Na dybe ("On the Rack"). In

1296-749: The 1905 Revolution , by moving to Dresden in February 1906, to enrol in the Royal Saxon Higher School after the government temporarily closed the Technological Institute. In Dresden, he met Sofia Dymshitz (1889-1963), who had recently married another emigre student named Isaac Rosenfeld (1879-1978). She and Tolstoy became lovers, and returned to rent a shared apartment in St Petersburg, where she took up painting. (Her sister in law, Bella Rosenfeld, married Marc Chagall ) Tolstoy's wife agreed to

1368-470: The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, he was able to return to Russia six years later and live a privileged life as a highly paid author, reputedly a millionaire, who adapted his writings to conform to the line laid down by the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) . Tolstoy's mother Alexandra Leontievna Turgeneva (1854–1906) was a grand-niece of Nikolay Turgenev , who had been a Decembrist , and

1440-539: The Russian nobility and the Church , Aleksey grew up in a staunchly atheistic and anti-monarchist environment, and was encouraged to be creative. He was home taught by his parents, and by a visiting tutor, until the age of 14, when the family moved to Samara, after selling their farm, and he was enrolled in a local school. Count Nikolai Tolstoy died in 1900, leaving a will from which Aleksey received 30,000 rubles . This allowed him to move to St Petersburg, where he studied at

1512-494: The 1920s, Soviet historiography was dominated by the Bolshevik historian Mikhail Pokrovsky , who despised "Peter, whom fawning historians have called the great" as a tyrant who provoked war with Sweden and impoverished his subjects. Tolstoy's 1929 play was true to the party line, depicting Peter as a tyrant who "suppressed everyone and everything as if he had been possessed by demons, sowed fear, and put both his son and his country on

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1584-649: The Bolsheviks had united Russia. While there, he eventually began collaborating with Maxim Gorky on the Pro-Soviet journal Nakanune . Ilya Ehrenburg later recalled: There was a place in Berlin that reminded one of Noah's Ark , where the clean and unclean met peacefully; it was called the House of Arts and was just a common German café where Russian writers gathered on Fridays. Stories were read aloud by Tolstoy ... Apparently, not all

1656-655: The Golden Key and their struggle against the evil Karabas, his loyal friend Duremar, and a couple of crooks: Alice the Fox and Basilio the Cat (based on The Fox and the Cat ), who are after Buratino's coins. After that, the events proceed similarly (although not identically) to Collodi's Pinocchio until the scene where the coins are stolen, after which the plots split apart completely. The name Buratino has been and continues to be used as branding for

1728-617: The Great was published in 1936, and won a Stalin Prize. In 1939, with war looming in Russia, Tolstoy produced a third version of his play, which stressed the importance of the army, and the patriotism of its foot soldiers. In December 1940 Tolstoy was commissioned to write a play about the life of Ivan the Terrible , after the Central Committee had issued an instruction that Ivan's role in history

1800-531: The Land of Fools)' is the title of the Russian adaptation of the Wheel of Fortune game show. Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Алексей Николаевич Толстой ; 10 January 1883 [ O.S. 29 December 1882] – 23 February 1945) was a Russian writer whose works span across many genres, but mainly belonged to science fiction and historical fiction . Despite having opposed

1872-618: The Red Count. While Tolstoy enjoyed huge popularity and success in Russia in his lifetime, western assessments of him have been generally negative because of his role as a Stalin apologist. Nikolai Tolstoy's summation of his distant relative was that "His personal character was without question beneath contempt ... in Stalin, he found a worthy master. Few families have produced a higher literary talent than Leo Tolstoy , but few have sunk to one as degraded as Alexei Nikolaevich. Professor Gleb Struve ,

1944-576: The Russian royal family. Anna Vyrubova was the lady-in-waiting to the Empress Alexandra , consort of Nicholas II , about whom there had been scandalous rumours of sexual relations with Rasputin or with the Tsar or his consort, all of which she denied when under arrest after the revolution. The 'diary' was "a vulgar and dirty forgery". In 1974, a minor planet was discovered by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Zhuravlyova and named 3771 Alexejtolstoj after

2016-620: The Soviet Union occupied the eastern part of Poland in 1939-1940 under a pact with Nazi Germany. In January 1944 he held a press conference for foreign journalists, in which he and other members of the commission asserted that the officers had been massacred by the Germans in August and September 1941. The special commission's report was submitted by the Soviet prosecution team at the Nuremberg Trials, but

2088-472: The Soviet populace. The creator of the Moscow Children's Theatre, Natalya Sats spent several months persuading him to write the work, and finally won him over by supplying his wife with foreign fashion magazines. He is also suspected of being the main author of a libelous and partly pornographic literary fraud entitled Vyrubova's Diary published in 1927, on instruction from the authorities, to discredit

2160-652: The Technological Institute St Petersburg in 1901-06. In June 1902 he married a fellow student, Julia Rozhansky, the daughter of a provincial doctor. Their son, Yuri, was born in 1903. According to Nikolai Tolstoy , he took part in a student protest on 12 February 1902 along Nevsky Prospekt , which was broken up by police and Cossacks, and joined the Social Democratic Party , but there does not appear to be any corroboration for this account of his student radicalism. He avoided becoming involved in

2232-400: The U.S. version, all of the puzzles in a show revolve around a specific theme, and the puzzle is an answer to a question given beforehand as an additional clue. If a player manages to guess three different letters in a streak (and during one turn), they can earn a permanent cash bonus by picking one of two boxes presented to the player. 0 points and bankrupt does not break. Special spaces on

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2304-418: The book, he started re-imagining it many years later in an attempt to come up with a series of bedside stories for his own children. The resulting tale proved to be so unique and was well-liked by the author's kids that he decided to write it down and publish it. Some researchers, however, do not tend to find this explanation plausible, since the first Russian translation of Pinocchio didn't appear until Tolstoy

2376-743: The boy becomes distracted by an advertisement for a local puppet theater show, and sells his textbooks to buy a ticket to the show. There he befriends other puppets, but the evil puppet-master Karabas Barabas (the story's Mangiafuoco character), wants to destroy him because Buratino disrupted the show. Karabas Barabas releases Buratino after he learns that Papa Carlo's home contains a secret door for which Karabas has been searching. A Golden Key that Karabas once possessed, but later lost, opens this secret door. Karabas releases Buratino and even gives him five gold coins, asking only that Buratino watch after his father's home and make sure they do not move. The story proceeds to tell of Buratino and his friends' hunt for

2448-451: The current rating of the show suggests it is intended for ages 16 and above, unlike the American version which is suitable for all age groups. On the American show, the wheel spins fast and letters are guessed in a rapid-fire progression, whereas on the Russian show, the wheel is designed to spin very slowly so that the host can have lengthy conversations with the contestant. The candidates and

2520-403: The death of Maxim Gorky, but on reading Bread : I felt ashamed, bitter and very, very hurt. Don't you feel the stifling atmosphere in which 170 million Soviet people are suffocating? ... For the sake of Stalin's boundless ambition, historical facts are manipulated, and you put your thin hand to it ... In Bread , you are pushing the assertion that the revolution won thanks only to Stalin ... Fear

2592-410: The dice had been cast yet. There were people who called Gorky the 'semi emigre'... Alexey Tolstoy, surrounded by Smena Vekh (Changing Landmarks) people, alternately praised the Bolsheviks as, 'unifiers of the Russian land,' and indulged in angry abuse. The fog was still swirling. Tolstoy revisited Russia in May 1923, and decided to return permanently, having decided that "no literature will come out of

2664-516: The emigration". In his farewell editorial printed in Nakanune , he wrote, "I am leaving with my family for the homeland forever. If there are people here abroad close to me, my words are addressed to them. Do I go to happiness? Oh, no: Russia is going through hard times. Once again she is enveloped by a wave of hatred... I am going home to a hard life." Because of his ancestry he was sometimes called "Comrade Count" or "Red Count". Far from experiencing

2736-405: The face, M. immediately returned to Moscow." She did not explain why her husband, Osip Mandelstam struck Tolstoy, but makes it clear that Tolstoy was so well connected with the Soviet authorities that Mandelstam fled Leningrad because he was afraid that he would be arrested. According to other sources, Tolstoy had chaired a writers' 'court of honour' which looked into Mandelstam's complaint against

2808-403: The final round due to all players being eliminated, the game is over immediately.) The point totals are not shown during the game, but are instead announced by the host when the winner begins to buy prizes. However, the winner can also choose (but is not obligated) to participate in an additional bonus round, "Супер Игра" (the "Super Game"). In this bonus round, prizes are placed on the wheel, and

2880-435: The first three rounds uses a fresh set of 3 players, and players are removed from the game if they solve the puzzle incorrectly, or if they accept a prize. If one player remains in a round, the player does not automatically advance to the final, but is allowed up to 3 additional turns, after which they must attempt to solve the puzzle. If the last remaining player fails to solve the puzzle, they are also eliminated and nobody wins

2952-612: The following February. This original version, which was to have been performed in the Maly Theatre was banned by order of the political director the Red Army, Aleksandr Shcherbakov , who sent Stalin a memo explaining that Tolstoy had failed to portray Ivan as "the outstanding stateman of the 16th century". Despite this official rebuke, Tolstoy was awarded a Stalin Prize in 1943 for The Road to Calvary . In April 1943 Tolstoy completed The Difficult Years , his second play about Ivan, covering

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3024-475: The funeral (though he did make another, business journey to Petersburg from Paris). As subsequent events were to show, he could evince extraordinary callousness toward individual members of the human race, whatever his broadly liberal viewpoint toward the species at large. Aleksey and Sophia returned to St Petersburg in January 1909. By 1910 his success as a writer enabled them to move into a flat along Nevsky Prospekt , but because of her husband's refusal to grant

3096-409: The great Russian poets and writers : a sense of moral and social responsibility. His essence is that of a cynic and opportunist. Pole Chudes In late 2021, Channel One Russia stopped buying The Field of Wonders from VID and originally meant to replace it with a licensed version of Wheel of Fortune under the same name since January 2022. Due to a trademark dispute with VID, the title of

3168-411: The host are gathered around a well-laid table. An early tradition dating back to the first episodes of The Field of Wonders involves the contestants bringing in gifts for the host. For example, a contestant that works at a factory would bring in that factory's most famous product, or a contestant from a far-away town would bring in some culturally-significant item to represent where they live. Eventually,

3240-467: The main game. In more recent years, the Super Game puzzle consists of three words - one main word written going across, and two others going up and down, similar to a crossword puzzle . The contestant wins the prize spun for guessing the main word; a car is added to the prize for also guessing the two vertical words in addition to the main word. Failure to guess the main word, regardless of whether or not

3312-449: The master builder, is the symbol of the entire play. Stalin went to see the play, but left before the end, setting off speculation that he did not like it. Critics consequently trashed it, until Stalin sent Tolstoy a note saying "A splendid play. Only it's a pity Peter is not depicted heroically enough", and summoned him to advise him on how to write a novelised version of the life of Peter. The first volume of his uncompleted novel, Peter

3384-421: The new show was supposed to be Nashe Pole Chudes ( Our Field of Wonders ). However, VID later agreed to let Channel One keep the original The Field of Wonders name and the full 31-year archive, while Channel One will be producing the show onwards. Three contestants at a time compete by spinning a "cylinder" to determine a value or event, and then by guessing letters concealed in a puzzle to earn points. Unlike

3456-423: The player spins to determine the prize they will play for. Then, a puzzle is presented, and the player says four letters to be revealed (if they exist) in the puzzle. The player then has 60 seconds to solve the puzzle. If the player correctly solves the Super Game puzzle, the prize is won. Failure in the Super Game means that the player loses all of the prizes that they purchased, but retains any gifts or prizes won in

3528-424: The rack." In 1935, after Pokrovsky had died and his school of history had been denounced by the party leadership, and the Soviet economy had begun the process of rapid industrialisation through Five Year Plans , Tolstoy wrote a radically different play, Peter I , in which – borrowing a motto from Pushkin that 'Russia came into Europe like the launching of a ship' – the construction of a ship, with Peter acting as

3600-503: The regime. Instead of being denounced in Krasnaya nov , he had more work published in that magazine during the 1920s than any other author apart from Maxim Gorky , starting with Aelita . A critic writing in the same magazine praised The Road to Calvary as the best novel ever written by an emigre Russian. When Nadezhda Mandelstam published her memoirs in the 1960s, she opened with this enigmatic sentence: "After slapping Alexei Tolstoy in

3672-462: The retired hussar had been exiled to Kostroma for insulting the Governor of Samara. When strings were eventually pulled to arrange his return, he celebrated it by provoking a fellow-noble to a duel . Alexandra fell in love with Alexei Appollonovich Bostrom. In May 1882, already two months pregnant with her fourth child, she fled into the arms of her lover. The Count threatened Bostrom with a revolver but

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3744-438: The round. The final round is played by the winners of the three preceding rounds using the same rules. (Because a round can end with no winner, there may be only one or two players in the final round. In the event that nobody wins a round, the final round is not played, and the game is over immediately.) The winner of the final (if any) becomes the winner of the show and can then use the points earned to buy prizes. (If nobody wins

3816-454: The show's production company established a museum near their studio, where these gifts are now placed for public display. Most of the candidates also bring homemade food as gifts. The moderator often tastes something of the food and it is often given out to the public. Furthermore, each of the guests brings along a musical gift, so that the guest himself or his friends, relatives, well-known acquaintances and children perform on stage to entertain

3888-596: The story Nikita's Childhood , about growing up as an exile. Nikita was their oldest child, born in 1917, who was starting to speak with a French accent. While living in France, Aleksey wrote several plays, and began writing a lengthy historical novel entitled, The Road to Calvary , which tracked the period from 1914 to 1919 including the Russian Civil War , which he had completed by 1921. Reaction to it in Soviet Russia

3960-546: The team that investigated war crimes committed in Stavropol , which for the first time ascertained 'without reasonable doubt' that gas vans had been used by the Nazis to commit genocide. In December 1943 Tolstoy was one of a contingent of Soviet and foreign journalists who were sent to Kharkov to cover the first war crimes trial , at which three Germans and a Soviet collaborator were sentenced to death. Ilya Ehrenburg, who also covered

4032-552: The trial, later wrote: "I did not go to the square where the accused were to be hanged. Tolstoy said he must be present: he did not feel he had the right to evade it. After the execution, he came back blacker than night." In January 1944 Tolstoy was appointed a member of a special commission that was supposedly charged by the Politburo with investigating the massacre in Katyn forest of 22,000 Polish officers, who had been taken prisoner when

4104-440: The two vertical words were guessed, loses the prizes purchased. (Occasionally, the host will allow the contestant to keep one or more of the purchased prizes in the event of a Super Game failure.) Unlike the American version of the show, the Russian version places greater emphasis on the host interviewing and socializing with the contestants than figuring out the puzzle. According to Russian system of television age restrictions ,

4176-555: The wall and Alyoshka Tolstoy Would not skim it all. If Tolstoy was aware that she had linked his name with that of the reviled head of the NKVD , he did not bear a grudge. In 1940, he and Mikhail Sholokhov proposed that Akhmatova be awarded a Stalin Prize, which would have been her first official recognition by the Soviet literary establishment, but the proposal was vetoed by Stalin. Soviet critics abruptly changed their view of Tolstoy's work once he had declared his new allegiance to

4248-493: The wheel include; A player may attempt to solve the puzzle during his or her turn either before spinning the wheel or after, when they are able to call a letter. If that player correctly solves the puzzle after spinning the wheel, without first calling a letter, he or she receives the highest point value on the wheel for each instance of the un-revealed letter. The word must be read as shown, and correctly pronounced (though some variations in pronunciation are accepted). Each one of

4320-563: The years to 1571. In June he sent the script to Stalin, complaining that Shcherbakov had failed to say whether the play was to be allowed to be performed. Stalin then read both scripts, suggested changes, and final versions were completed in November. Both scripts were published in 1944, and The Eagle and His Mate received its premiere in the Maly Theatre in October, but the reviews were such that it

4392-432: Was 13, his mother began a lawsuit to have him recognized as the son of Count Tolstoy, which eventually he was on his 17th birthday, after which he was entitled to style himself as Count Tolstoy. Tolstoy's adoptive father was a liberal landowner, who had supported the emancipation of Russian serfs in the 1860s. His mother wrote children's stories, using the pseudonym Alexander Bostrom. Due in part to their rejection by both

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4464-523: Was an advantage. One young poet he met mistook him for Leo Tolstoy , who had died in 1910 aged 82. In 1908, he learnt from his ex-wife that their son had died from meningitis . According to Nikolai Tolstoy, Sophia claimed in a pious official memoir published in Moscow in 1973 that Alexey, 'took the child's death very much to heart.' One may question this. The father, after all, made no attempt to visit his ailing son before his lonely end, nor did he return for

4536-494: Was as abrupt as it had been with Julia. Out on a stroll, Aleksey said significantly, 'I feel that this winter you're going to leave me.' Sophia did not reply, but took the hint and departed for another visit to Paris. The baby Mariana was deposited with an aunt." Tolstoy hoped to marry Kandaurova, but she rejected him, and before the end of the year he had met his third wife, Natalya Volkenstein, née Krandinskaya, by whom he had three children. During World War I Tolstoy worked as

4608-415: Was becoming a foreigner, Aleksey moved the family to Berlin , which was then one of the main centers of the Russian diaspora . There, he wrote his science fiction novel, Aelita , and became associated with the 'Changing Landmarks' ( Смена вех ) group whose leading thinker was Nikolai Ustryalov , who were also known National Bolsheviks , because, despite their opposition to communism, they acknowledged that

4680-482: Was exculpated by the courts. The ecclesiastical court, in granting a divorce, ruled that the guilty wife should never be allowed to remarry. In order to keep the expected baby, Alexandra was compelled to assert that it was Bostrom's child. What is known is that Bostrom brought the boy up as his own child, on his family farm in Samara province, and that he was known in his childhood and in his teens as Aleksey Bostrom. When he

4752-455: Was in his mid-twenties; while others believe he may have been originally exposed to Pinocchio in the context of another language. Miron Petrovsky, in his article on the subject, states that the book was based upon a 1924 translation made by Nina Petrovskaya (1879–1928) and edited by Tolstoy, who had already removed many of the elements absent in The Golden Key . Like Pinocchio , Buratino

4824-511: Was not included in the verdict, and in the 1980s, the Soviets belatedly admitted that Stalin ordered the Katyn massacre. As the leading spokesman at the press conference in January 1944, Tolstoy played a major role in ensuring that the Soviet version of the Katyn massacre – which is now known to be a lie – was widely reported in the USA and Great Britain. Tolstoy died on 23 February 1945 in Moscow. Tolstoy

4896-499: Was obliged to leave his regiment and the two capital cities, and retired to an estate in Samara, Russia . There he met and married Alexandra Leontievna Turgenev, a lively girl of good family, but slender means. She bore him two sons, Alexander and Mstislav, and a daughter Elizabeth. But the wild blood of the Tolstoys did not allow him to settle down to an existing domestic harmony. Within a year

4968-477: Was published in 1936; the figure of Buratino quickly became hugely popular among children in the Soviet Union and remains so in Russia to this day (Buratino is one of the most popular characters of Russian children's literature ). The story has been made into several films, including the animated 1959 film and the live-action 1975 film . According to Tolstoy, he had read Pinocchio as a child, but, having lost

5040-628: Was taken off, and the next performance opened a week after Tolstoy's death. The premiere of The Difficult Years was delayed until 1946. In November 1942 Tolstoy was appointed a member of the Extraordinary State Commission , established to investigate atrocities committed on Soviet territory by the German invaders and their allies. During the Nuremberg Trial the Soviet prosecutor Lev Smirnov posthumously credited Tolstoy with having led

5112-469: Was to be re-evaluated. The instruction was followed by a phone call from Stalin, who told Tolstoy that Ivan had 'one shortcoming', which was that he 'repented of his cruelty.' After the German invasion , Tolstoy moved to Zimenki, a village east of Moscow, where he wrote the first scenes of The Eagle and His Mate , covering the years 1553-59. In November 1941 he was evacuated to Tashkent , where he completed it

5184-486: Was very hostile. The leading Bolshevik literary critic, Aleksandr Voronsky , editor of Krasnaya Nov described Tolstoy's depiction of the new regime as a "tendentious lie" full of "improbable banalities" and berated the writer for his "countish hatred, his lordly disdain, his spite, bitterness, fury." By 1921, Tolstoy was bothered by the Gallicisms appearing in his son's spoken Russian language . Declaring that his son

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